Lehigh English Department Graduate Student Blog

All posts tagged: job search

When I applied to the MLA’s Connected Academics proseminar early last summer, I knew I wanted to explore alt/non-academic career options, but I wasn’t quite sure what that meant. So in my application, I focused on three ideas: my “commitment to connectivity” and public discourse about the humanities; my valuation of the project of translation; and my desire to increase my professional self-knowledge. I tried to show how I had a longstanding research and teaching […]

April is an exciting month here in Drown as we wrap up the academic year with a Literature and Social Justice visiting lecture, more pedagogy workshops, a transferable skills panel, and a number of dissertation defenses. As Dashielle suggested in her recent post, one way to deal with mid-semester stress and anxiety is to get out into your community to celebrate (and stress!) with them. Whether you need the teaching boost of a pedagogy workshop, […]

At last I present the long-delayed sequel to the post on contingent labor. Part I covered the realities, both good and bad, of being an adjunct; here, I will recap our panelists’ advice on finding adjunct work, surviving it, and planning an exit strategy enabling you to leave it.

Yesterday’s Contingent Labor Panel, part of Jenna Lay’s Job Market panel series, featured four of our Lehigh colleagues, either current students or recent graduates. Colleen Martell, Rebecca Martin, Nicole Batchelor and George Mote have a variety of experiences in the adjuncting world, and they each offered advice for getting adjuncting jobs, advice for planning an exit strategy, a picture of the realities of the contingent labor market, and most surprisingly, the benefits and even pleasures to […]

Almost a year ago, I wrote a post for the NASSR Grad Student Caucus blog called “Alt-Ac-Attack: Thoughts on Preparing for the Job Market.” At that time, our department was just starting to increase professionalization practices geared towards alt-ac options. In fact, I think the term was still new to me at the time. Since them, it seems like everybody’s talking about it, from grad students and faculty in the department to larger academic blogs, […]

Lynn’s talk offered a number of helpful tools for those of us who cannot even fathom how to start a job search outside of the traditional academic, tenure track route. Her first piece of advice was to identify your skills; our work in English translates, she pointed out, into marketable skills. For instance, teaching and presenting at conferences gives us the skill of public speaking. This perspective helped me, at least, realize how I can […]